Credit Unions are service-oriented financial institutions managing a lifetime of money for clients. In particular they offer loans to account holders at better interest rates than they could pick up elsewhere.
So the sales trick at a Credit Union is to land a mortgage for a qualified homebuyer who already has an account or two, plus some credit cards, maybe even multiple family members with credit union accounts, and who will soon come to have the need for financial planning services, tying the client’s ever more intertwined financial live to the credit union’s own continued operations.
Keep the money in house. Everybody works.
And so due to all of this, the task of getting qualified people to apply for mortgages at a Credit Union is cutthroat territory in the internet’s paid search game.
Because a continued existence for all operationally profitable credit unions is based on the same fundamental need: A steady stream of qualified mortgage applications, coming through the door.
How do you spot these people? The ones looking around for good interest rates in the local area, thinking they might like to pull the ripcord and purchase a home?
Safe to say they look it up on the internet, in a search engine, where paid ads target specific words and phrases that come to define the limits of a transaction in search of a market.
The most profitable paid keyword searches under basic logic would be “mortgage”, “home loan” and so forth. A Credit Union would pay for its ads to be placed prominently in search engine results whenever those words are typed in.
The equivalent to being the first injury attorney billboard on the freeway just outside the airport. The first locksmith entry in the yellow pages. The first funny lite beer commercial after tip-off.
It’s the one everybody sees, and it’s how marketing operated for years up until now. Fully fifty per cent of what got ordered from the marketing department was never gonna work, but everybody was only ever guessing at where in the whole hundred per cent body of work the strings of that other half were woven in.
And so the price for those popular terms is higher because a lot of folks still work in the fifty/fifty model, meaning they are hoping, guessing, wishing that whatever marketing creativity gets produced, the effort will be rewarded by viewers who remember it.
And for that to happen it has to be so memorable, so effective, so clever and unforgettable that the competition for eyeballs isnt even close.
Expensive marketing campaigns based on popular paid search words will only ever eat away at the Credit Union’s budget, and they won’t bring down that cost per conversion one single penny.
We told them it doesn’t have to be this way.
You can target mortgage loan applications and even get ahead with research into more profitable keywords and an infrastructure that tracks back with so much accuracy that we can come back to you and say
“it took $78 to find and target one qualified online mortgage application that goes all the way through to a full, satisfied and happy homeowner with a home loan. And that from now on for every $78 on average you spend you get an application from the website that actually goes through, and is that expensive for you?”
And the Credit Union could look at that number and discuss it in a meeting and come to see that the ability to measure a customer’s acquisition cost is the culture of performance. And we are an agency that offers to deliver that performance for clients.
Ecstatic. Dumbfounded. Still no jaws on the floor though.
Not all clients know right away what they want, but they come to us like a back patient to a chiropractor or a masseuse. They depend on us to dig our fingers into the flesh and bones of their enterprise and diagnose what’s holding back healthy commercial flow.